The “surge” decades of the ‘60s (British Invasion pop and psychedelia) and ‘90s (rave culture and electronic music) gave way to the “going-in-circles” decades of the ‘70s and the just-completed 2000s. In his reading, we’re in an extended cultural moment of “hyper-stasis”-and not for the first time, either. Instead, they can simply Google a phrase, and spend an evening tumbling down the rabbit hole of not-so-old history. Human beings need not rely on the foggy hard drives in their skulls anymore. He says we’re victims of a “crisis of overdocumentation,” facilitated by “YouTube’s ever-proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection” and the fatiguing amount of digital music history only a couple mouse-clicks away. Focusing on music, Reynolds asserts that recycling the past is nothing new, but that the vast digital advances of the most-recent decade have caused the amount of unimaginative and static retro culture to explode. ![]() ![]() Music critic Simon Reynolds tackles just this question in his book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, released in mid-July. The underlying question: Is pervasive nostalgia for the recent past… normal? Or is there something wrong with today's fixation with the past?
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